Best Free Anonymous Surfing Service

I definitely do not agree with this comment. It is one of the most comprehensive review of the anonymous browsing tools available today.
Kudos.
(Silki)
http://webtoolsandtips.com/pc-security/freeware-free-anonymous-web-brows...

Maybe you could become an editor and contribute to the site too?

Thank you for your concern. Although Ultrasurf has been the center of some controversy, there is no evidence that it is or ever has been Malware of any form. However, there have been reports of viruses being attached to the program. This can be done to any program in the hands of someone with unkind intentions. You can avoid getting a virus from a known friendly program by downloading it only from the developer’s website.

Replies here to make the comment more visible:

I2P!!! Invisible Internet Project FTW!!!!!

www.i2p2.de - Everything you'll ever need! Almost... ;)

For IM and filesharing with friends - OneSwarm!
www.oneswarm.org

I agree with u a whole lot,try CYBERGHOST VPN.IT has a basic & premium level(BASIC IS FREE) & it's very fast.How it works----open cyberghost vpn before u open eny browser set up & account----use ur existing email address & a password of ur choice then they will send a conformation code to ur inbox.use it to activate the program------best of all it work with all ur browsers,no need to change proxy it do every thing for you.one eg to know if it rally works use firefox extension (EXTERNAL IP) shows ur current IP in the bottom of firefox,right click on it then click (ALERT ME WHEN MY IP CHANGES).once running cyberghost vpn it will change ur ip then firefox will alert u (check it out u'll thing u're using ur regular network) remember u have to down load it first-------also try hidemyass.com if this is not for u---have fun surfing anonymously and invincible @ the same time.

MAC ADRESS!

Search on Google for MacShift for Windows or macchanger for Linux.

I had not previously heard of Hotspot Shield, I'll take a look. My first impression, I'm not sure I would want to use it myself. They say it is free, but in the (very long) Hotspot Shield Terms of Use and AnchorFree Privacy notices, having skimmed very quickly, I see mention of creating an account, privacy and confidentiality, and how they use information they collect on the site. Whoa! What's that, information they collect? Isn't this all about privacy and anonymity? I thought it was.

Interestingly, the download is available at http://hotspotshield.com, yet there is almost no other information there than a few links to articles and one link to their terms of use. I had to go to http://anchorfree.com to find a page with a Privacy notice link at the bottom of it, at http://anchorfree.com/privacy.php Read through the privacy notice and see for yourself what information is collected and how they use it.

From the privacy policy under the section titled "the way AnchorFree Uses Information" (my emphasis added):
AnchorFree uses or may use Automatically Collected Information and cookies information to: (a) provide custom, personalized advertisements, content, and information; (b) monitor the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns; (c) monitor aggregate usage metrics such as total number of visitors, and pages viewed; and (d) track your entries, submissions, and status in promotions, sweepstakes, and contests.

From the terms of use, (my emphasis added):
1. Privacy Policy
We believe strongly in providing you notice of how we collect and use data, including personally identifiable information, from the Site. Therefore, we have adopted a Privacy Policy, linked from the bottom of each page of this Site, to which you should refer to fully understand how we collect and use information. You understand that through your use of this Site or the Services, you consent to the collection and use (as set forth in the Privacy Policy) of this information, including the transfer of this information to or from the United States for storage, processing and use by AnchorFree.

Anonymizing software? Maybe so - you make your own choices. Basically, this is an interest of mine, I have nothing to hide, and what I do need to keep secure, I use KeePass password safe to store passwords, TrueCrypt to create encrypted virtual disks to store files I would not want others to find if I lost my notebook computer or flash drive, and https links to browse anywhere that needs security, or OperaTor if I'm feeling paranoid. A bigger concern than browsing should really be what kind of personal firewall do you have? Have you ever installed a firewall and looked at how many times people/computers are probing, trying to break into your computer? The number of hits against my firewall / router which sits between me and my cable modem shocked me in the beginning. Now, I could care less. I have a firewall protecting all my computers at the cable modem, and then I also have a Comodo firewall running on each Windows computer.

For browsing, if you use SSL (https) for your banking, e-bay, amazon etc, you're doing ok. Using an anonymizer to browse to banks and online shopping seems kind of wrong to me. I may be way off base here, but I would take a guess that a large percentage of people who really want anonymizing capabilities are hiding porn surfing activities, and that is an entirely different issue. There is a price to pay for that when using anonymizing services, everything comes down much slower. For banking and anything else financial - do you really want anything to come between you and that financial institution? I don't, and I don't follow links to my bank, amazon, e-bay etc. I type the URL in myself, or use KeePass to open a new tab in Firefox, (I don't ever store passwords in my browser), and then type or use KeePass to feed my name and password automatically for me, under my own control.

I'm not sure what this comment means. OperaTor does not ask for a proxy. JonDo allows you to choose from different Tor servers. Vidalia and other packages along with your own browser of choice (Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer - I'll restrain myself and not comment) will allow you to browse normally or configure them to use the proxy when you want the anonymity.

The added advantage of OperaTor over using your own browser and another separate proxy is that by default OperaTor also cleans up all tracks - cookies, cache, browsing history, searches, everything, unless you deliberately go and turn off that cleanup activity yourself.

See my reply (two below) after some fairly extensive testing using a sniffer on my own PC while browsing with OperaTor with the proxy both on and off. My conclusion, the traffic is encrypted.

Sorry all - I have been somewhat distracted with some major work related issues for a while that have kept me from coming back, updating, and responding to questions. I'm going to try to find evidence to back up what we have been previously led to believe that the session is encrypted, and address other questions. I would not use the presence or absence of the padlock icon to reassure myself about a session being encrypted, because that will appear if the browser is using SSL encryption (generally with https URLs)

I'll try browsing to my own web server using a few of the different anonymizing browser / addon combinations with a sniffer active on my PC and see what I catch. If I hit a simple text page and get back a bunch of gobbledy-gook using OperaTor, and plain text using Opera alone, that will be a good indicator.

I have done some fairly extensive testing by sniffing all TCP traffic on my own PC using OperaTor 3.3 (Opera 9.63) with the proxy both on (redirected via Polipo and Tor) and off while browsing to http://whatismyip.com. Traffic *is* encrypted. When I view the captured TCP packets (UDP and ICMP have no real interest in a test like this), traffic while not using the proxy is readable and recognizable when I display the captured packets in ASCII / hex dumps. When I view the equivalent packets from when OperaTor redirected traffic via Polipo and the Tor network, the packets to the exact same web page are completely unreadable with nothing recognizable at all, not even the DNS name or IP address of the whatismyip.com site.

The 'golden padlock' or whatever icon a browser uses indicates an authenticated *https* session, which generally uses SSL. Opera / OperaTor do not put a golden padlock at the bottom of the page (actually, the status bar at the bottom of the browser is the usual place), they put a yellow bar with a black padlock symbol in the URL entry field. The only thing that tells you, is that the particular web server you are connected to is using an SSL encrypted session between you and the server. The secure padlock symbol means nothing in terms of anonymity.

Not seeing a padlock symbol in the browser indicates to me that the traffic between the browser and the Polipo proxy (using OperaTor) is probably not encrypted, but the encryption takes place between Polipo and the Tor network.

Sorry Adam, I don't know. I have no access to Imacs, but I will see what I can find out. It is possible that one or more of the browsers I have listed has versions available for OS X

Voice activation in Opera should not be affected in any way by, or care about any other browsers you have installed. That will be an Opera specific issue. I installed the voice activation extras once, but never bothered with them because I have no real use for that sort of feature. You should be able to find answers to all problems like this on the Opera support forums.

This is not entirely / necessarily true, it depends on your local network setup and whether or not you are using the anonymizing proxy servers. ipconfig shows my IP address as 192.168.0.10. Yes, I don't mind giving you my IP address, nobody can hack me using it, because this is a private, internal, non routable address that is issued to this particular PC I am using by my D-Link wireless router / firewall which has 5 other computers attached and it uses NAT to send and receive packets to the right computer. My real world IP address is issued to by my ISP via my cable modem to my D-Link router. The real test is to browse to a service like http://whatismyip.com or http://www.ipchicken.com/ and see what your IP address is, then turn the proxy on / off in the browser and see the difference. My real world IP comes up as a 72.x.y.z address when I turn the proxy OFF in OperaTor, but as 87.118.101.102 when I turn the proxy ON. The IP reporting site displays what it believes my address to be, which is not my real address. The only system that knows my real IP address is the first proxy that Vidalia / Tor / Privoxy etc. depending what you use connects to. That proxy sends a packet request to the next proxy and so on, until the final destination is reached, who only knows the last proxy's address.

Any authorities trying to track what you are doing would need to be sniffing your network, or your ISP's, and have access to each site along the way. Of course your outgoing packet request indicates the site you are connecting to, but that site has no idea where you are coming from, so if for example you are into some illegal activity and the site you are connecting is being monitored, you could only be traced if every proxy in the chain cooperated with the feds and extracted logs to allow them to trace back to you. If they are watching you already, they will see you go via your internet connection to your ISP, to a proxy, and the URL you are browsing to will already be known.

OperaTor can be somewhat slow, but you will find that any of the other browsing services like XeroBank, JonDo, or any browser using any part of the Tor network of proxies will have slowdowns. This is for a combination of reasons, a few being that you are increasing the distance between you and the web server you are browsing, adding the overhead of every server in between, and dealing with network congestion along the way as other users like you are also using the anonymizing proxies.

Distance may seem like a minor issue, you connect to the internet and the internet gets you there - but start thinking further and you will see how it adds up. If for example you live in New York, connect using OperaTor which first routes you to a proxy in California, which in turn routes you to a proxy in Germany, then to Korea, and finally back to Canada, it will take significantly longer for the light pulses to travel via fiber optic cables along all that distance than if you had just the direct connection, or even one intermediate proxy. Remember that you are limited by the speed of light along the fiber optic cables, and the more intermediate "hops" you introduce, along with the routers and switches and copper LAN cables for the proxy servers, the more delays you introduce. If you only depended on a single packet being sent, you would never notice it, but once you start transferring a page full of text along with a bunch of binary files such as images, you increase the delays.

I don't believe that anything can ever truly mask IPs, but if the proxies behave as they are intended to, each proxy in the chain only passes on what the next system needs to know so that the full path back to you is never known by any server other than the first one you connect to. If you pass through just one proxy and it truly does what it is intended to, the web server you connect to will only know that the proxy requested a page. if you pass through two or more proxies, each one only knows about the one immediately before it.

Even if you spoofed MAC and IP addresses, there would still be some amount of trail leading back to you, including such things as your computer name if somebody chose to make use of that. If Javascript is enabled in the browser, the world is potentially open to the web server and any Javascript apps embedded in any pages, another reason I would be very unlikely to use Internet Explorer for any browsing where I really wanted to be as secure and anonymous as possible.

Of course it is somewhat ironic that while I took an interest in anonymous browsing a long time ago when Gizmo was still running the whole Tech Support Alert alone, I really have very little if ever any real need to make use of anonymous browsing, and anyway can't do it from a work environment as work proxy servers filter very effectively to protect company resources, as they should.

Sorry for the delay in responding. I have not looked at google chrome yet so I would be guilty of misinformation if I tried telling you anything much about it. My understanding is that incognito mode is no more than clearing (or rather not caching or in any way recording) all history of activity. I don't believe it has any anoymizing proxy capabilities, however I could be wrong. As far as I know chrome simply connects like any other browser, but it may also mask some specific computer information. Details like your IP address, ISP etc will never be completely masked even with services such as Tor, the trail is simply obfuscated by having multiple proxies in the route which don't record or divulge anything to either side of themselves other than the data packets being sent.

These utilities are purely for anonymous browsing. You still need other anti-virus/ad/malware/spam tools to complement these. A good option is to use Firefox with Javablock, Adblock etc together with Vidalia or JonDo, but I would still rely on other utilities to protect against nasties.

Vidalia simply ties you into the Tor network. It is hard to say for sure which is more secure, or which networks and proxies have the best and securest configurations. JonDo uses some dedicated proxy servers (in the subscription based model) which may give better levels of security simply because the user is paying for a dedicated service. Then too, that is not necessarily true. Since we are using browsers for the proxy serving, we can't easily use tools like traceroute to find how many hops are involved, and which servers are being used to verify the exact paths our traffic takes. JonDo had a little meter showing the anonymity level as Ok, Fair or high which gives us a clue as to how their program is reporting the level of security. That meter may be reporting something meaningful, it may be simply giving us a false sense of security.

With software like anonymous browsing, firewalling and many others, false positives are fairly common, especially based on the potentially unusual behavior these apps use compared to other normal everyday tools. Symantec antivirus corporate, AVG free and others show OperaTor 3.1 and every previous version I have used as being uninfected. I almost always use http://jotti.org now to scan any new downloads like this, and sometimes see two or three warnings out of 15 or 20 virus scanners. I don't believe there is any threat at all in OperaTor, if I did I would not be using it myself and recommending it to others, but thanks for the heads up anyway.

Thank you! There is something new to learn every day.